What You'll Do
Why This Role Matters
As countries across the globe mandate continuous transaction controls and electronic invoicing, Avalara’s ELR platform is at the forefront of digital commerce transformation. The systems and integration tools you build will directly power how enterprises seamlessly connect their core business applications to tax authorities across the globe, ensuring uninterrupted business operations in an increasingly regulated digital economy.
The Opportunity
We are hiring a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical authority and chief platform builder for Avalara’s E-Invoicing & Live Reporting (ELR) ecosystem. As governments worldwide transition from post-audit VAT models to real-time e-invoicing, CTC (Continuous Transaction Controls), and live reporting mandates (e.g., Peppol, SDI in Italy, Chorus Pro in France, KSeF in Poland, NF-e in Brazil, etc.), businesses face unprecedented regulatory complexity.
This role is a high-impact, hands-on individual contributor role focused on architecting mission-critical, high-throughput ELR platforms while fundamentally transforming how customers and partners connect to Avalara. A core pillar of this role is designing next-generation tooling, developer experiences, and automated platforms for frictionless customer onboarding, enterprise ERP integrations, and automated schema/format transformation.
You will collaborate closely with distributed engineering teams across the U.S., Europe, India, and Brazil, leading through architectural design, code prototyping, and technical mentorship.
What Your Responsibilities Will Be
Architect at Global ELR Scale
- Lead the architecture, technical vision, and platform evolution for distributed, multi-tenant ELR cloud services supporting millions of real-time transactions across diverse global jurisdictions.
- Design ultra-low-latency, fault-tolerant ingestion pipelines, format transformation engines (XML, JSON, UBL, CII), digital signature services, and automated tax authority dispatch gateways.
- Architect systems optimized for strict auditability, high availability (99.99%+), multi-region active-active deployments, and data residency/compliance isolation.
Build Next-Gen Customer Onboarding & Integration Tooling
- Pioneer self-service integration frameworks, developer toolkits, and onboarding accelerators that reduce customer time-to-value from weeks to hours.
- Architect automated data mapping, format translation, and schema validation engines that streamline integration with major ERPs, billing systems, and custom customer architectures (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite).
- Build interactive testing, simulation, and validation sandboxes allowing enterprise customers to simulate country-specific mandate flows and tax authority responses prior to going live.
- Standardize modern API designs, webhooks, SDKs, and event-driven integration patterns across the entire ELR product suite.
Be a Hands-On Builder
- Write production-grade foundational code, reference implementations, SDKs, and architectural spikes that engineering teams build upon.
- Drive rigorous design and code reviews, championing architectural consistency, modularity, and operational resilience.
- Proactively identify performance bottlenecks, systemic risks, and technical debt across distributed services, driving architectural remediations.
Lead with AI
- Design and embed intelligent, AI-powered capabilities into ELR workflows—such as automated schema mapping, predictive error remediation, anomaly detection in high-volume invoice streams, and conversational onboarding assistants.
- Establish architectural patterns and security standards for responsible, high-leverage AI integration across backend pipelines and developer tools.
- Drive measurable efficiency gains by automating complex regulatory data extraction and customer integration testing with AI.
Raise the Technical Bar & Mentor
- Mentor and grow senior engineers across global teams through technical coaching, architectural guidance, and hands-on pairing.
- Establish engineering standards for API design, system observability, automated testing, documentation, and operational excellence.
- Cultivate a culture of innovation, simplicity, and rapid iteration across global engineering layers.
What You'll Need to be Successful
Required Experience
- 15+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with extensive experience designing and operating large-scale distributed cloud systems.
- Proven track record designing and delivering developer tools, integration platforms, self-service customer onboarding engines, or enterprise integration middleware.
- Strong proficiency in modern backend languages and runtimes (such as Java, C#/.NET Core, Go, or Python).
- Deep mastery of API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), event-driven architectures (Kafka, EventBridge, RabbitMQ), and microservices design patterns.
- Experience with complex schema definitions, validation, and payload transformations (e.g., XML/XSD, JSON Schema, UBL, EDI).
- Extensive experience with AWS (or other major cloud providers) and modern DevOps practices (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes/ECS, CI/CD).
- Demonstrated ability to navigate complex domain logic and regulatory requirements with clarity and robust software abstraction.
Strongly Preferred
- Direct experience in E-Invoicing, Live Reporting, Peppol, EDI/B2B data exchange, or adjacent fintech/compliance/tax domains.
- Hands-on experience building ERP connectors or middleware integration tooling for enterprise platforms (SAP, NetSuite, Workday, Dynamics 365, Oracle).
- Experience architecting systems with strict data sovereignty, digital signing (PKI, HSM, X.509 certificates), and cryptographic verification requirements.
- Experience designing or integrating generative AI and ML models into production data pipelines or developer tooling.
- Clear builder mindset—passionate about code, architecture, and solving hard technical challenges as an individual contributor.
What Success Looks Like
In your first 6–12 months, you will:
- Establish a unified architectural roadmap for customer onboarding tooling and integration accelerators across the ELR ecosystem.
- Deliver foundational platforms and tools that measurably decrease enterprise customer onboarding time and integration friction.
- Partner with engineering leads across Platforms, Core Services, and Applications to modernize core ELR processing engines for global scale.
- Embed AI-driven tooling into integration and validation pipelines to automate manual configuration and mapping steps.
- Serve as the trusted technical anchor and mentor for the global ELR engineering organization.
How We Work (OPAH FOCUS)
Success at Avalara means living our values:
- Ownership – You take end-to-end responsibility for outcomes, architectural health, and customer success.
- Adaptability – You thrive in dynamic environments as global mandates, technologies, and customer needs evolve.
- Curiosity – You challenge assumptions, explore cutting-edge solutions, and continuously seek better ways to build.
- Humility – You listen actively, learn continuously, and lead through influence and collaboration without ego.
- Urgency & Simplicity – You deconstruct complex global problems into clean, simple, and high-impact solutions with speed.
Why This Role Matters
As countries across the globe mandate continuous transaction controls and electronic invoicing, Avalara’s ELR platform is at the forefront of digital commerce transformation. The systems and integration tools you build will directly power how enterprises seamlessly connect their core business applications to tax authorities across the globe, ensuring uninterrupted business operations in an increasingly regulated digital economy.
Avalara is an AI-first Company
AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products. Success here requires embracing AI as an essential capability.
You’ll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies, ready to thrive here.
You’ll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results for your team, our company, and our customers.
You’ll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices, and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.
How We'll Take Care of You
Total Rewards
In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.
Health & Wellness
Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.
Inclusive culture and diversity
Avalara strongly supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is committed to integrating them into our business practices and our organizational culture. We also have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship.
What You Need To Know About Avalara
We’re defining the relationship between tax and tech.
We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing over 54 billion customer API calls and over 6.6 million tax returns a year. Our growth is real - we're a billion dollar business - and we’re not slowing down until we’ve achieved our mission - to be part of every transaction in the world.
We’re bright, innovative, and disruptive, like the orange we love to wear. It captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset. It shows off the culture we’ve designed, that empowers our people to win. We’ve been different from day one. Join us, and your career will be too.
We’re An Equal Opportunity Employer
Supporting diversity and inclusion is a cornerstone of our company — we don’t want people to fit into our culture, but to enrich it. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, age, gender, national orientation, disability, sexual orientation, US Veteran status, or any other factor protected by law. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.